:: OSEL.CZ :: - New hypothesis: Is Oumuamua a pancake of frozen nitrogen from exopluta?

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Pancake of frozen nitrogen. Credit: William Hartmann / ASU.

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The story of the first discovered interstellar visitor, the object 1I / ʻOumuamua, takes on the dimension of a Shakespearean drama. And no wonder. The body that flew in from outside the solar system has very strange parameters and is now escaping our reach. A number of hypotheses revolved around the origin of such a visit, including the ones that were properly untied. Anyway, it looks like it’s going to be something special.

Steven Desch. Credit: ASU.

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Arizona State University (ASU) experts suggest that the ʻOumuamua object, which we first detected in October 2017, could be a bizarrely shaped piece of an exoplanet, or rather a dwarf exoplanet like our Pluto. It should be a pancake made of frozen nitrogen.

Steven Desch and Alan Jackson are convinced that their model explains all the strangeness that accompanies an extraordinary visitor to the solar system. According to them, it is simply a piece of nitrogen ice, the truth of a strange shape that apparently got into space during a cataclysmic collision, which struck an exopluto.

Scenario of the story of the object ʻOumuamua. Credit: S. Selkirk / ASU.

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Researchers have analyzed in detail the different types of ice and their behavior if they traveled through the solar system like ʻOumuamua. They also considered the dimensions and shapes of such a piece of ice. In the end, they concluded that the observations of ʻOumuamu object best matched the pancreatic acid from nitrogen ice. The estimated albedo of such a pancake most closely resembles the surfaces of Pluto or Triton, which are covered with nitrogen ice.

According to the authors of the study, it is most likely that the object ʻOumuamua went into space after a cosmic collision that occurred about 500 million years ago, in some other planetary system. There was a Cambrian period on Earth at the time, and our ancestor looked like something you’d rather not go to the movies with. That collision had the object of ʻOumuamu detonated away from his native system. In 1995, he entered the Solar System, which he will leave again around 2040, without ever seeing him closely. According to Desch and Jackson, ʻOumuamua should be about 45 by 44 meters and about 7.5 meters thick. The nitrogen glacier is actually similar to the hydrogen glacier hypothesis that was proposed last year. But nitrogen ice is much easier to imagine.

Apparently, the object of ʻOumuamu could have behaved strangely without being an alien probe. Avi Loeb, the promoter of the technological origins of ʻOumuamua, will probably be sad, but he will survive. He’s a dreamer, not an idiot. On the other hand, to dig the author, the number of previously reliably detected nitrogen ice pancakes from the exoplut in the Solar System was exactly the same as the number of reliably detected extraterrestrial probes. Either way, ʻOumuamua remains a fascinating object that could greatly inspire us, in many ways.

Video: Interstellar object ‘Oumuamua